Links
Internet Bookmarks and Notes http://www.lostgarden.com/2006/10/what-are-game-mechanics.html "What Are Game Mechanics?" by Daniel Cook "Game mechanics are rule based systems / simulations that facilitate and encourage a user to explore and learn the properties of their possibility space through the use of feedback mechanisms. It is a simple definition, but it offers a good amount of insight into why games work and how we can make them better." -- I'd probably make more sense to go with something less complicated like -- game mechanics are rule based systems that facilitate and encourage players to explore and learn to identify with activities or object concepts through the use of feedback mechanisms. Cook diagrams and explains feedback mechanisms in this article really nicely as well which is remarkably helpful. - http://jducoeur.org/game-hist/ "Medieval & Renaissance Games" by Justin du Coeur "This page is intended to cover anything and everything pertaining to games in the Medieval and Renaissance periods." - http://rpggeek.com/ - RPGGeek is an extension of the BoardGameGeek.com project which is also incredibly useful. "BoardGameGeek is an online board gaming resource and community. The site is updated on a real-time basis by its large and still growing user base, making us the largest and most up-to-date place to get gaming information! There are reviews, ratings, images, play-aids, translations, and session reports from board gamers across the world, as well as live discussion forums. are a website dedicated to the subject of physical board games. The site provides an extensive database of boardgames as well as an active community of users who discuss, argue, buy, sell, trade and play board games. The database contains over 70,000 board games (as of June 2014) and each game has its own Game entry which gives information about a game, user ratings, forums for discussion and a great deal more." - http://specialrpg.wikidot.com/the-special-system The Special System RPG Page The Special System RPG Page is a wiki style database on the mechanics used for character creation in games like Fallout. "SPECIAL is a character creation system used by the Fallout series of games. It's named after the 7 attributes it tracks for characters: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck." - http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ The Pathfinder Reference Document by Paizo Inc. "The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is released under the Open Game License, meaning the core rules that drive the Pathfinder RPG system are available to anyone to use for free under the terms of the OGL. This compendium of rules, charts, and tables contains all of the open rules in the system, and is provided for the use of the community of gamers and publishers working with the system." - http://www.glorantha.com/product/heroquest-core-rules/ HeroQuest Core Rules by Robin Laws "HeroQuest is an innovative, dynamic, and flexible rules engine suitable for play in any genre or setting. It presents a simple and flexible system that allows Game Masters to make decisions the way authors and screenwriters do when creating novels, TV episodes and movies. HeroQuest encourages creative input from your players, resulting in an exciting, unpredictable narrative created through group collaboration. Its resolution methods and scalable character levels make it equally suited for any genre, from epic Gloranthan fantasy to gritty occult investigations. - http://sillyhatbooks.com/about/games/ "The Compendium of Free Role Playing Games" by Chris Garrison "This is a collection of games, and links to games, that I’ve collected over the past decade." - http://www.dyasdesigns.com/roleplay/dicelessgames.html "A Diceless Roleplaying Games Listing" by Lance "Garthan" "Historically 'diceless' in roleplaying games has really meant free of artificial randomizers not simply dice, and such is the case of most of these games. Non-artificial randomizers are acceptable, these are generally balanced or non-transitive game choices which often map to real world choices. Diceless gaming is far from system-less and a clearly defined environment with well defined characters reduces the perceived problem of making decisions based on solely those factors, but actual detail level can be a sliding scale. A good language for describing how actions are attempted can be the defining element of action resolution and introduce considerable variability in itself. A good decision driven gaming system should give players a lot of choices about the details of their characters actions... up to a point this can be improvised but what is really needed is some form of systematic analysis. The trick of good diceless play seems to be making sure the players decisions are involved not just the story guides, point of fact, this can be considered an element of good roleplay of diced or diceless nature, however with the third wheel of arbitrary chance removed, its impact or 'power' must be distributed and often this means "more power" lands in the hand of the players rather than less." - http://www.d20resources.com/ d20 Resources by Brendan Quinn "site was created with the idea of making playing d20 games easier. There are tons of incredible rpg books available for reference; I should know, I (like many of you I would assume) have shelves full of them. The problem is that with all of this reference material, sometimes it's simply too cumbersome to have every book on hand and available when I just need a quick rule fast. Short of memorizing page numbers, I needed a better way to look up rules and stats so that my players didn't have to wait for me to find something common. My solution is this website." - http://www.dicetower.com/home.html The Dice Tower "The Dice Tower is dedicated to getting folks to learn about the wide world of exciting new board games. We do video reviews, and an audio show, and more." - http://www.gamecabinet.com/rules/Dice.html - "Dice" by Joe Celko "Role playing and simulation games have introduced dice in non-cubic shapes, but the traditional spotted cube has endured the test of time. In fact, dice are credited by several historians as the oldest gambling device invented by man. I would like to take some time to give the humble cube another, more detailed, look. This is not so much an article as a collection of interesting facts." - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/19664/classic-dice-games - boardgamegeek.com I ran into an item called "Classic Dice Games" (1990) "Flip-Up - Roll 2 dice and mark off the number you rolled or any two that add up to what you rolled. Try to get all 12 numbers (1 through 12) marked off. Hi-Dice - Score the highest amount of points based on 5 rolls, but at least one die must be set aside each roll. Poker Dice - Get the best possible poker but there are no suits and straights do not count." - http://www.raymuccillo.com/search/label/games -- Links to a collection of my (User:Raymuccillo) blog articles on gaming, mostly so I remember to bring the useful bits from that research over here. Category:Browse